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Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Language Stories (part 1): Why I simultaneously have millions of cousins and no cousins at all

On Friday, I partook in a surprise performance for my
cousin’s wedding celebrations. Another cousin, a professional dancer, put
together a routine that my entire family – imagine a lot of Homer-Simpson-sized
bellies and one eighty-something-year-old grandma – attempted to follow. It was
totally Bollywood (through beer goggles), and made me realise my family, and
all families to an extent, are really, really weird.

We’ve called ourselves Tribe Shah since I can remember, and
there seem to be an endless number of us. There is no doubt that I’m from a close-knit
family, but I still always struggle to describe what I mean by ‘close’ to my
English friends. I don’t know what half of my family do for a living (and I don’t
care either), I don’t know what their favourite colours are, but I do know that
every single one of them would drive out of their way to collect me if I was
stranded somewhere. And I’m talking extended family here: the partners of my
dad’s cousins and further. Except I don’t think of these people as ‘extended’
at all.

In Gujarati, at least in the cobbled together dialect that I’ve
learnt (which includes a lot of slang, some random Swahili words, English words
said in an Indian accent, and a bunch of totally made-up words), there is no
word for cousin. I call all of my cousins bhai or ben, which translate to 'brother' or 'sister'. The same goes for my parents’ cousins – I refer to them all as
though they’re my mum and dad’s actual siblings. The surrogate ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’
is a figure who appears in a lot of families – I’m certainly not unusual in the
fact that I call my mum’s best friends ‘auntie’, but it’s not quite so simple
in our's…

Conversely to the idea that all cousins, no matter how they
are related to you, become siblings, the generic words ‘auntie’ and ‘uncle’
only tend to be used for those who are close, but not technically related either
by blood or through marriage. For
everyone else, there are very specific words to describe the relation. If a
friend tells me that she’s going to her masi’s birthday party, for example, I
know immediately that she’s talking about her mum’s sister. Gujarati is my
first language, and this means that I have always known exactly how every
single person in my tribe is directly connected to me. I don’t need to know
what they do in their free time; I just need to know that they’re mine. Just as
the world stops seeming so big and unfamiliar to a child who has the words to
describe the things around them, my family doesn’t seem so large and sprawling
when I know exactly who everyone is.

I do have some bens who I would consider to be friends, but
that’s an added bonus. I am close to them in two ways, rather than in one.
Family – or lack thereof – plays a huge factor in defining who a person, or
character, is, perhaps just as much as gender, or race, or culture. It’s a word that has no definite meaning, that
shrinks and stretches depending on how each individual interprets it, that
summons up different feelings for different people at different times. I’m not
saying language is enough to create a strong, close-knit family, but it has
certainly made the people in mine more than strangers. I hate them sometimes, but I’m lucky to have
them.